[PLUG] Please Google, stop trying to be so helpful

[John Jason Jordan]

/Rant/
A long time ago I signed up for a Gmail account, which I still use
for a few things. Then a couple years ago I got an Android phone, which
required setting up a new Gmail account. And a year ago I got a new
Android phone which required setting up yet another Gmail account. And
last year PSU decided to switch all their pdx.edu accounts to Google
Mail. I have two pdx.edu e-mail accounts (don't ask, the story is too
stupid to relate). So now I have a total of five Gmail accounts,
although I never use the two Android accounts.

The other day I needed to log into my Youtube account with Firefox. I
clicked on the login button and up popped the PSU universal login
screen. WTH? I tried several more times, but the only thing that would
come up was the PSU login screen. There was no option to log in as
another user.

I finally called PSU's help desk. The solution turned out to be
disabling a lot of Google cookies on my Firefox. I was amazed - Google
had dozens of cookies on my Firefox. After disabling most of them
finally Youtube's login screen came up.

Unfortunately, having disabled so many Google cookies, now a Google
search takes forever. The screen flickers over and over as Google goes
out to numerous servers to get heaven only knows what kind of data to
display on my screen (ads, most likely). 

I realize Google makes money on ads and I'm willing to put up with them
for the benefit of the free things Google does for me and for the open
source community. But creating cookies that limit the user to logging
in only to Google accounts is going too far.